Looking back over the last 40 years, the presidential campaign that most closely resembles this year's is the contest between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in 1976. The Republicans were the incumbent presidential party that year, as they are now, but the Democrats had a big advantage in party identification -- on the order of 49 percent to 26 percent then, far more than today.

The Republican president who had been elected and re-elected in the last two campaigns, Richard Nixon, had dismal favorability ratings, far lower than George W. Bush's. His name could scarcely be mentioned at the Republican National Convention. The Democratic nominee was a little-known outsider, with an appeal that was based on the idea that he could transcend the nation's racial divisions. Jimmy Carter, a governor from the Deep South, had placed a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. in the state Capitol in Atlanta.

Ford's political situation then was far more parlous than McCain's today. An early summer Gallup poll showed him trailing Carter by 62 percent to 29 percent. He had barely limped through the primary contests against Ronald Reagan, who continued his campaign up through the mid-August national convention. His political ads had been disastrous, and on Aug. 1 he did not have a general election media team in place.

Yet by November, the race was about even. Ford ended up losing by just 50 percent to 48 percent. A switch of 5,559 votes in Ohio and 3,687 in Hawaii -- 9,247 votes out of 81 million -- would have made Ford president for four more years.

How this came about is an interesting story, and one of obvious relevance to the McCain campaign this year. Much of it is told in a book two copies of which are currently available new and used on amazon.com, "We Almost Made It," by Malcolm MacDougall -- a professional advertising man, still active, who had played no significant role in presidential campaigns before 1976 and has not done so since.

MacDougall was brought into the Ford campaign on Aug. 7 (!) by Douglas Bailey and the late John Deardourff, whose political advertising firm then worked mostly for liberal Republicans. Bailey Deardourff produced the national advertising, while MacDougall, headquartered in New York, prepared the dozens of ads aimed at specific states and regions, all under the supervision of a former under secretary of commerce from Texas named James A. Baker III. They almost pulled off one of the biggest upsets in the history of American politics. Continued...